1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink-jet printer that ejects ink onto a printing medium to perform printing.
2. Description of Related Art
Some ink-jet printers perform printing by ejecting ink onto a paper as a printing medium from a printing head that reciprocates perpendicularly to a paper conveyance direction. It is important, from the viewpoint of printing quality, to ensure flatness of the paper in a print region confronting the printing head. Thus, particularly when a long paper is used as the printing medium, there may be adopted an approach in which many holes are formed in a platen that supports the paper in the print region and a suction fan disposed under the platen generates suction force through the holes to thereby bring the paper into close contact with a surface of the platen. The holes formed in the platen are, in general, arranged on an entire surface of the platen in a substantially uniform pattern.
In such a printer, in association with a conveyance of the paper on the platen, the paper closes the holes sequentially from upstream in the paper conveyance direction with holes disposed in an area to which the paper has not yet reached open. That is, holes disposed downstream of a downstream edge of the paper in the paper conveyance direction (hereinafter, simply referred to as “leading edge”) remain open. When the suction fan drives in this condition, a large amount of air flows into the holes that remain open. Therefore, there is a problem that, when such a printer performs printing onto the vicinity of the leading edge of the paper, airflow generated by the suction force of the suction fan leads away ink that is ejected by the printing head toward the vicinity of the leading edge of the paper, to result in decreased ink-landing accuracy and thus deterioration in printing quality.